In 2004 I composed a small polemic for GLQ ominously titled “Geopolitics Alert!” That effort was followed by a cautionary essay in 2007 called “The Voyage Out: Transacting Sex under Globalization,” and finally, in 2016, a coedited special issue, “Area Impossible,” on the fraught couplings of area studies and queer studies (Arondekar and Patel 2016). If you're sensing a theme, or even a tiresome repetition of cautions and concerns, you're not wrong. At stake then and now remains the critical labor of geopolitics in the mappings of queer/trans studies or, more precisely, the instrumentality of area/region in the legitimacy of sexuality/ gender's discursive regimes. While the early debates around the geopolitical cleaved largely to a language of lament, erasure, and general outrage (hence my alarmist early polemic in 2004), there was a seeming clarity of corrective purpose. Queer studies was (is?) too exhaustingly white and not right, a by-product of an extractive US-centered knowledge supply chain. The turn to the transnational, the global, the geopolitical, the regional, was seen as an intervention, an epistemic dike that would stem the tide of US-funded queer takeovers. Alongside the rise of queer of color critique and many other theoretical kin in indigenous, disability, animal studies, and more, there was a sense that queer/trans studies was experiencing a radical sea change.1Even as such transnational turns and voyages out expanded the terrains of our engagements, I wonder now, as I did then, could such geo/histories, geo/objects forge critical vernaculars both within and without a US-based queer studies? After all, Gayatri Spivak's (2003) early pronouncement (yes, it was 2003!) on the enduring asymmetries of knowledge economies has hardly been reversed. The “inconvenience” of too many languages, too many histories, too many divergent objects of studies colors much of what we continue to do today. As a scholar who works in South Asia, I am always nudged (however gently) to provide glossaries, translations of terms that at least 1 billion folks else/where inhabit and understand. We still live inside monolingual and/or metrolingual landscapes, populated by an appetite for geopolitical diversity that nevertheless returns us to the gift of the master language. To be clear, such monolingualism (epistemic and literal) exists as much in the rest as it does in the West. There remains a dearth of scholarly writing in nonmetropolitan languages across all hemispheres, even as queer/trans subjects flourish and proliferate every day.2 As such, Spivak's (2003: 10) principled “too bad” rejoinder still demands attention, and perhaps further translation. Is the “too bad” an incitement to action, a rousing yet paradoxical acceptance of the necessary but impossible task of learning other/wise? Or more bluntly, is it a plangent admonishment that learning from below is always an exercise in humility and incommensurability?3 All I can say is that the punchy “too bad” stands as a stark reminder that we will never know enough, learn enough, and indeed extract enough, for the subaltern to speak. And that endures as our inconvenient truth.I have returned often to this Spivakian dictum, more so when I sat down to compose this review essay. Even as queer/trans-ness is lambasted as the new neoliberal, crony capitalist mission, a messy bricolage of pinkwashed ideology, homonationalism, feminist governance, and a whole lot of gay and trans internationals (I may have missed a few more choice descriptors), could trans/queer studies think with and along these geopolitical knowledge asymmetries as the very conditions of scholarly production? Could queer hermeneutics, slanted through geopolitics, help us bypass this worlding industry in which state and capital continually refurbish refusal as product? While it is laudable to have scholarship on India, Egypt, Philippines, or Brazil (pick your favorite queer else/where) take center stage for an issue or two, would such scholarship become the citational foundation for queer understanding? Would we ever bypass the hoary press of the North/South binary and focus more on South-South conversations? After all, queer/trans epistemologies are always spaced forms, familiar lexical imaginaries, housed within the languages of geopolitics and difference. Reproductive futurism is always geopolitical futurism; queer utopia is equally queer geography, where other worlds are continually reproduced as contexts, exemplars, at best interruptions in a journey that inevitably and necessarily shepherds us back into the diversified holdings of an American studies project. If sexuality's difference is always marked by gender, race, class, caste, and more (jettison that white child please), it is equally a story of spatialized difference. To put it more ambitiously, could our voyages out forge a queer/trans geopolitics? Or as my coeditor Geeta Patel and I asked in our special issue, could histories of area be histories of sexuality?Such foundational concerns and more animate the wide-ranging scholarship of Rahul Rao, Evren Savcı, and Howard Chiang, the three authors whose timely and trenchant works are in conversation here. Axiomatic for all three scholars is the clear understanding that there can be no coherent theory of geopolitics. For each, their varied geographies rattle and rouse the very concepts (nation, identity, history, religion) that they are summoned to translate and theorize. Each text extrapolates from a sedimented history of area and/or region that mobilizes the abstractions and institutions of the geopolitical as cautious signs and sites of scholarship on gender/sexuality. As such, we have divergent and sometimes contradictory translations of the geopolitical that render gender/sexuality in different tenors, genres, and politics: postcolonial studies (Rahul Rao), Middle Eastern/Islamic studies (Evren Savcı), and Sinophone studies (Howard Chiang). In what follows I will engage with each author's efforts to think of the geopolitical (in all its varied avatars) less as a mark of distinguishing exemplarity (or contextual specifics) but more as a signifier and episteme of histories of gender/sexuality. At stake thus is less a summation of their complex and rigorous arguments (for that, read their wonderful books please!) but more an attention to the epistemological and disciplinary conventions that summon geopolitical heterogeneity. Rahul Rao speaks through his vexed disciplinary and intellectual home in international relations; Evren Savcı marshals the vernaculars of sociology, ethnography, and affect; and Howard Chiang wrestles with the evidentiary regimes of historiography and area studies. Conceived amidst escalating climates of authoritarianism, sectarianism, militarization, and political violence in India, Uganda, Turkey, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China (PRC), the three books dexterously embrace the challenge of writing histories of gender/sexuality within conditions of peril and possibility. Legal rights and representation of queer/trans collectivities expand and/or contract alongside the surveillance and persecution of all forms of dissent, protest, and refusal.While each book signals the stakes of its interventions through a central concept-metaphor, be it Rao's focus on postcolonial temporalities, Savcı’s project of queer translation, or Chiang's turn to transtopia, there is a shared agon of arrival in every narration. A “productive paradox” (Savcı 2021: 2) propels the three authors into their writing, a displacement, if you will, of the inherited temporalities and epistemologies of queer/trans theory. Most stridently, for Rao, it is his unease with the “temporal lag and rupture” of histories of sexuality (xx), the tiresome dialectic of Western imposition and non-Western incorporation that he wishes to exceed, and indeed jettison. Rao's work is clearly derivative of Jasbir Puar's critical corpus, especially her insight on statecraft and homo/nationalism, and in many ways, Out of Time is an effort to extend Puar's (2002, 2007) work across more comparative and divergent geopolitical contexts. Indeed, one of the striking achievements of Rao's analysis is his ability to think comparatively within a South-South postcolonial framework, providing a rare reading of empire's shadow across continents and collectivities. Uganda (the worst place to be gay) and India (the most aspirational place to be gay) set the stage for us as the multipronged project of queer freedom unfolds across conflicted and collaborative relationships with inherited colonial laws, postcolonial statecraft, and transnational supply chains, fueling both resistance and compliance. Rao is at his critical best, for example, when he charts genealogies of homophobia as homegrown iterations of the “foundational grammar” of the postcolonial state (215), in his careful reading of the mythology of Mwanga, a nineteenth-century Ugandan king. Mwanga, whose alleged homosexuality ironically sutures the “native” past to a neoliberal postcolonial present (214), is equally embraced and disavowed within Ugandan public memory as a source and scourge for the emergence of LGBTQ freedoms.Rao's theorization of homocapitalism (a new kin of/to homonationalism) emerges as the text's key intervention. Unlike more rehearsed denigrations of capitalism that uphold romanticized movement histories as counterpoint, Rao's contributions seek more nuanced ground. What is lost, Rao asks, when the postcolonial state and postcolonial queer movements both cede to networks of capital that mobilize gender and sexuality inclusion (let's bring in the queers) at the very moment of their continued erasure (let's bring in the upper-class, upper-caste queers)? More resources (and rights) are accessed even as nonmarket-allied queer lives survive amidst landscapes of precarity and deprivation. Given that Rao begins his book by querying “how time matters differently in the queer postcolony” (2), it is only thus fitting that he ends with a temporality of resistance and possibility against the relentless march of homocapitalism.4 To do so, Rao turns to the “backwardness” movements of trans/Dalit collectivities who choose pathways of nonlinearity to secure economic rights and legal representation (174). While the census category of Other Backward Castes (OBC) delegates lower-caste bodies to a telos of stalled development and progress, the same category is refurbished to amplify lower-caste struggle. To be “backward” within the topographies of census and data is not to surrender the time of modernity, but to seize it from the stranglehold of upper-caste and normative linearity. To be “backward” is to belong multiply: past colonial categories revitalize and rupture present bodies of resistance.Rao's invocation of a resilient homocapitalism translates into the more specific complex of “neoliberal Islam” in Turkey in Savcı’s provocative Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam. If Rao suggests that the rise of neoliberalism proliferates morality crises in Ugandan society that in turn spawn myriad representations of homo/trans phobia, Savcı amplifies that claim through the twinning rise of neoliberal Islam and the explosion of LGBTQ movements in Turkey. Savcı charts a lively and counterintuitive history of trans/queer movements in Turkey (2000s), which emerge at the very moment of the ascension of the so-called moderate Islamist party, Adalet ve Kalınma Partisi (AKP: Justice and Development Party), a pro-West, pro-globalization party. The efflorescence of queer/trans history alongside the electoral affirmation of a Muslim vote in a Muslim-majority country stages the central translation of the book, making the combative dichotomy of Islamist extremism versus Western neoliberalism an untenable fiction. Such a coupling between Turkey's AKP and queer/trans movements, Savcı notes, however, is short-lived. In 2015 the AKP renewed police persecution of PRIDE marches, spawning a new generation of dissent and activism. The book is a riveting account of that seismic shift, from AKP's embrace of queer/trans rights to their rejection of them, from the encouragement of queer visibility to the crushing of all dissent.Savcı’s analysis of such a shift bypasses the familiar and tired mantra of a radicalizing Islam in a Muslim-majority country. Instead, Savcı attributes AKP's reliance on modalities of securitization, surveillance, and moral conservatism to a burgeoning neoliberal citizenry that nestles Islam within supply chains of capital distribution. To speak of a neoliberal Islam, or more radically to center neoliberal Islam as a vector of queer analysis, reorders the grammar of queer critique. No more an object of search and rescue, or the maligned and “subjugated other of Western modernity” (3), neoliberal Islam confounds the very languages of Euro-American queer articulation. As Savcı pointedly notes, the caricature of locals (the treasure trove of anthropology) either as failed/foiled subjects of queer freedom, or alternately as exemplary radical forms, evacuates any thick engagement with queer/trans movements in Muslim-majority countries. It is only critical translation that troubles such staged binaries and provides us with a historically situated “ethnographic study of the contemporary Turkish Republic as a lived reality grounded in political economy and government rule” (3).At times, Savcı’s theorizations of queer translation rest on a linguistic turn and, at other moments, on an interruption of a conventional geopolitical rendering of Islam. We are reminded (as Spivak noted all those years ago) that there are multiple and often competing category forms that make up the histories of gender and sexuality. The English-centrism of queer/trans studies eschews the multilingualism of diverse bodies of Islam. After all, Turkey's Sunni majority is counterposed by other minoritized Islams, just as queer/trans history inhabits a myriad of layered and contrasting forms. What is most compelling in Savcı’s emphasis on queer translation as a modality of geopolitics is that it speaks to the historical ontologies of linguistic categories, mediated through transfers of power and capital. Translation becomes the episteme of the geopolitical, moving us away from the focus on subjects and subjectivity as the only pathway to queer justice.Governance with and in neoliberal Islam translates the cultural into the economic, requiring new vernaculars of queer analysis. Savcı reminds us (as does Rao) that gay (neo) liberalism (through its alliances with racial capitalism) creates subjects who consume and migrate into homonormative kinship forms (family, marriage), even as they are seen to be in constant need of protection, surveillance, and security. Yet such broader repudiations of neoliberalism often presume Islamophobia as its active component. How does one engage such critiques in spaces where Muslims are not the minority, as they are in the Euro-American translation of Islamophobia? Turkey decisively ruptures such inherited languages of queer critique in its relationship to Islam as a lived, contradictory, and vibrant ethos. From the confounding and sensational murder of a gay Kurdish man, to unholy kinships between religious hijabi women and LGBTQ activists, from the emergence of the public commons that is Gezi Park, to new economic alliances, Savcı leaves us with a rich compendium of queer keywords. We are in constant living translation.To close, I want to turn to Chiang's Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific, a dizzyingly ambitious book that wrestles with asymmetries of disciplinary forms and historiographical evidence amidst ongoing geopolitical upheaval in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. While Rao and Savcı speak to the paradoxical and “out of time” couplings of neoliberal governance and queer/trans movements and their translations, Chiang invests more in a “continuum” model whereby “transtopic” historical thinking dwells in the plethora of representations (material, psychic, social, etc.) that yoke themselves to transgender existence. Identarian models of transgender forms, Chiang argues, limit the horizons of epistemic possibility, requiring a recuperative and/or stabilizing presence that elides the vastness and ubiquity of their histories. And we have a wide array of histories available for perusal: Harry Benjamin's (1885–1986) sexological treatises, the genealogy of a spectacular Chinese trans category, renyao (literally “human prodigy”) castrated subjects in Sinophone cinema, and, finally, the checkered history of transgender activism in the Asia Pacific. And like Rao and Savcı, Chiang too brings together studies and transgender stage and of the of Chiang's however, remains less After all, by now, we know that there exists a of gender and Western What does is Chiang's on the and of geopolitics in our of forms. The book, for begins with Chiang's at the Queer in where the of as historical presence is just as on in Hong Western historiography to and Chinese to of the of at the very moment when Hong police across a few Chiang, such asymmetries of the central geopolitics in any history of gender and not to of but to the historical that our analysis. Savcı and Rao, Chiang is equally to shift the for neoliberalism the critique of models of and capital. The is less to and Hong to the stage of history, but more to the of history As such, one key of the book is a of what Chiang of (3), in which the multilingualism and of Chinese as a historical object are or Chiang works with of Sinophone and on the of where remains the and Sinophone collectivities in Hong and work in with Chinese in the from Hong of to a place with as We the of and to an understanding of gender as of the with no trans As a of Chiang does his best work in 1 when he follows the rise of the American through the and representations of From and to and a historiography of emerges in which each geopolitical of a different story of gender's difference. Transtopia is thus a of historical of and difference is not in it the very forms of its emergence in histories of sexuality. That may be the of this book, as it demands new for the of trans there is clearly much more to say all three what remains clear is their of queer of analysis. To say that there is within these around would be an Each text dwells on the of such epistemologies of and to queer/trans studies to the task of geopolitics, not as an for or but as a of and often impossible that task may it the of queer/trans studies.